Find out how to design professional business cards for you and your clients. Part 1 of 2

Written By Ed
9/18/2006

Product:


Disclaimer:
This business card was created for education purposes ONLY. There will be no resell or any type of reuse of the card without WebDevTutorial's consent. But that does not mean you may not learn the skills we are teaching you today from this tutorial to create your own business cards to sell or use.

Downloads:
To create a standard business card, we will need a standard template to work off of. This template has been provided by VistaPrint which is one of the largest online printing companies. If you choose, you may use VistaPrint to print the completed business cards and it will be within their product source file regulations and print perfectly.

Click here to download Template

Tutorial:
Now with the VistaPrint template downloaded, we are ready to get started with designing our own business cards. We first have to start off by unzipping the template that you downloaded from above. If you haven't done so, go to the download section of this tutorial and download the VistaPrint template now. After unzipping the document, double click and open the business card psd template. This should open a template in photoshop that looks like this:



The template provided by VistaPrint is a small guide for us to design our business card around. The red margin is where VistaPrint will be trimming off and the blue margin is a small guide where they can work around. When designing our business card, we will have to leave space for these two margins to have them properly printed when sent to the printer.

With our template in photoshop, we first have to turn off the guides layer. Click on the "eye" in the layers window for the guides layer. With the guides layer hidden, we can proceed in designing our professional business card. The first step in designing a professional business card is understanding what needs to be presented in the limited space. A well laid out business card should be straight forward and easy to understand for the recipients. In our example business card, we will use our company logo and also provide my name and some contact information. If you already have a company logo, then you can skip the next section.

--- Begin Professional Logo Design Basics ---

In this short tutorial, I will be teaching you how to design your own professional logo. Lets start by creating a new canvas in photoshop by going to File > New and with dimensions 500px width and 500px height and also with a transparent background:



After creating the new canvas, you should now have a clear transparent canvas to work on. Now lets fill the background with white using the fill tool (). Click and hold on the marquee selection tool and choose the Elliptical Marquee tool.



With the tool selected, drag and drop a small ellipse shape. Create a new layer by clicking on the New Layer button in your layers panel and choose the fill tool () and fill in the ellipse with Black. After doing this, you should now have a black ellipse in the middle of your canvas. Do not deselect the circle, click again on the marquee selection tool and move your selection so that only a part of the ellipse is in your selection. With the ellipse layer still active, press the delete button on your keyboard. Afer this, your canvas should look like this:



Press Ctrl + D on your keyboard or go to Select > Deselect to delselect the marquee. Now lets duplicate the marquee layer by right clicking on the Ellipse layer and select duplicate. A menu should pop up and name the new layer Ellipse Top. Your layer structure should look something similar to:



With the Ellipse top layer selected, go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical at the top menu. This should flip the top ellipse vertically. Now we want to flip it horizontally, so go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Use the move tool () and move the top ellipse to the right and bottom alittle so that the two ellipse does not overlap. After this step, your canvas should look something like this:



Now use the text tool () and write WT or any other acronym you like. Set the text to be 200 pt size and italic font. I used the font Myriad Pro in my example, you may use whichever font that suits you. Position the text in the middle of the two ellipse so it looks somewhat like:



Hold Ctrl on your keyboard and using your mouse click on the WT text layer. This action should make photoshop select the WT text. After selecting the text, go to Select > Modify > Expand and expand the selection by 5 px. Click on the Ellipse top layer and press delete on your keyboard. Do the same for the ellipse bottom layer. You should have something like this:



With that, you have completed a great looking logo. I chose to do the whole tutorial in black because with black, you can color in the logo later to use it for different applications. I colored mine in with grey and red and also added in some text to spice it up. My finished product looks like this:



--- End Professional Logo Design Basics ---

With your logo ready to go, copy and paste your logo onto the business card canvas. Your logo may need some resizing as does mine, therefore go to Edit > Free Transform to resize your logo or simply press Ctrl+T with your logo layer selected. Place the resized logo on the right hand side of your canvas so that your business card canvas looks somewhat like so:



At this point you should have a pretty clean canvas with your company logo placed onto your business card. In the next and last part of our tutorial, I will teach you how to add alittle bit more spice onto the design and finally complete the project.

Click here for Part 2 of Designing a Professional Business Card